PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Hello,

I've been trying to bust laggy GUI issues regarding only PT (the system itself is smooth).
I have an i9 10900k that runs at roughly 30% system usage und current large sessions. The whole system is smooth, 3 displays, 64GB ram, however the PT windows are quite laggy. Scrolling, zooming, all cause a slight lag when executing. Longer with automation lanes viewable or lots of clips on screen.
It also pauses the TC counter and plugin window updates for a short moment.

This lag has always been there in some form on older systems too it seems and didn't disappear when upgrading to this new beast of a system.
Even 2022.7, which seemed to increase it a bit, hasn't really solved it.
The video window itself runs smooth, no issues when zooming etc. It is as if PT itself is internally trying to draw and move pixel information and just doesn't fly doing so.

GPU is an nVidia RTX 3060, 3 displays at full HD 1920x1080 - so nothing exotic.

Does anybody have any ideas?
I've tried playing with ProcessLasso, CPU affinity and processor scheduling, no real difference so far.

What was weird - with Avid support on this too, I tried trashing prefs and restarting. It seemed that for the first few moments of PT, it was lightning smooth. Also I managed to somehow crash the video engine / alt-tabbing between other apps on starting up PT, and something crashed but it behaved smoothly after that. It is as if PT is "pinging" the system in a way to see how to behave - or a sevice starts up that bogs things down.

As I said, I can actually watch Youtube streams, scroll and zoom PDFs etc. while PT is playing back and all is lightning - but inside the PT-app shell, all GUI updates/redraws are slow. Nothing compared to Mac studios I freelance at, they all are lightning fast.

Thanks for any ideas!
Best,
Andrew

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Did you try to update Nvidia drivers to the latest?
Windows manually download the old but stable version

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Thanks, yeah... I've tried a few things.
Latest was updating video drivers.
I would love to hear if any of you can re-create the issue:

In a session with lots of clips, if you display volume lanes on all tracks, does that slow down your scrolling, zooming etc?
Same with track heigh -> smaller tracks, more lag? Large tracks (4-5 or so on screen), smoother scroll up/down?

Also, does the scrolling freeze the TC counter?

All this happens here... even an empty session with say 150 audio tracks, no plugins or audio, shows this behaviour.
Smallish dialogue editing sessions with volume automation lanes -> sluggish.

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

In Preferences, turn off "Separate Clip" Operates on All Related Clips and research and try different Processor Affinity settings with and without hyperthreading on.

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Restore boot image from before the issue occurred.
Do all AVID optimizations. Even if you think you've done them all already, just check them again and don't skip anything - at least until you've found the issue.
Do all AVID troubleshooting steps. Even if you think you've done them all already, just check them again and don't skip anything - at least until you've found the issue.
Go through the Windows system settings and basically turn off most of that stuff. You can Google/Youtube for suggested Windows optimizations "for gamers".
Uninstall graphics drivers, then install latest from Nvidea site only.
Kill startup items. (This is one of the the AVID troubleshooting steps above.)
Make sure ALL plugs are up-to-date. All of them.
Take all Windows updates.
Run CCleaner (clean plus also reg clean). Run a spyware scan. Update browser. Delete cookies.
Test Pro Tools by creating a brand new session (your old sessions might be corrupt)
Thoroughly uninstall Pro Tools. Reinstall.
Windows clean install...

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Thanks all for your suggestions,

yes I've been hunting down with clean boots etc.
Weird, as I get "smooth minutes" after booting, up until a certain thing happens.
What I have found - once the slow down kicks in, there is a Windows event logged in event manager with no. 5382, linked to Windows security auditing.

How can I find out what is causing this?
Anybody into debugging or so? Thanks for any ideas!

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

You can read over suggestions and re-state your issue, or, you can actually roll up your sleeves and do the suggested troubleshooting steps. For example, step one above: Restore boot image from before the issue occurred. If this does not solve it, go on to step 2 etc etc etc. Hope this helps!

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Thanks for your post - Well, this is a pretty new audio system from a specialised dealer, DPC latency optimization etc done. PT gui has never been smooth, so unfortunately there is no "system restore" except for putting it back in the box.
I would like to find a way to localize the windows process doing the security audit call.
I think it might be linked to a user account synchronization call, but will need to hunt that down in detail.

Win update is sth I will do when in between be projects, as that tends to create other issues (it tends to update drivers of other components and those sometimes mess up DPC latencies).
I have had this do more harm than good (or should I rather say more work in the end) in the past.
Will see if using OOShutup to stop user sync does anything.
Optimization, AFAI remember, recommend keeping all Microsoft services running, or is there a list of which to disable?

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Is OneDrive running in the background uploading anything? Have you done all the Avid optimizations, including disabling Turbo-Boost and C-States in BIOS? Have you installed and run LatencyMon for 15 or 20 minutes to see if there is a driver causing issues? Have you tried setting Processor Affinity?

Don't trust a computer builder to do what you need for Pro Tools. And don't trust settings that may or should be made not changing to default with a Windows update.

Re: PT GUI laggy - other apps smooth
 

Thanks!
Onedrive is disabled, but there is a mirror service that I am still trying to deactivate. It is somehow protected enough easily disable to be our services, maybe I need to do a registry hack.
Turbo boost disabled, I tried c States and hyperthreading, no difference. I disable turbo and check for throttling via throttlestop.
LatencyMon is smooth, all green. But good point, I'll see if I catch anything when when this event log ID kicks in.
The thing is, Audio isn't affected, playback is smooth. It is a purely graphic issue.

Processor Affinity doesn't change or target this specific issue, minor audio improvements noticable though in full sessions.

There seems to be sth targeting a specific CPU core, that goes up to 60% or so constantly after some time. The rest are at under 10%, so all in all it doesn't register. If anybody knows how to analyse threads or processes on individual cores, I'd be happy to hear. The core number changes with every reboot, so I don't think it is is a hardware issue.